Honey, I Shrunk the PC

January 10, 2014 | 00:00

Honey, I Shrunk the PC

At the CES 2014 held in Las Vegas Intel’s CEO Brian Krzanich’s introduced a PC built into an SD card-sized casing called the Edison. It uses Intel’s Quark chip which was launched last year and is seen as Intel’s answer to the rapidly emerging wearable and ‘Internet of Things’ market. The Quark ...

At the CES 2014 held in Las Vegas Intel’s CEO Brian Krzanich’s introduced a PC built into an SD card-sized casing called the Edison. It uses Intel’s Quark chip which was launched last year and is seen as Intel’s answer to the rapidly emerging wearable and ‘Internet of Things’ market.

The Quark is a 22nm low-power dual-core x86 processor that Intel also use in their Galileo (Arduino compatible) development board which they introduced last year. In the Edison this processor chip is combined with some LPDDR2 and Flash memory. Connectivity is catered for by the built-in Bluetooth 4.0 Smart and Wi-Fi capability. The Edison’s SD card format is also used by the Anglo-American startup Electric Imp, which has been offering an SD card-sized, ARM based device for almost a year. The Imp is available as a slot-in SD card or solder-on form but lacks Bluetooth Smart for device-to-device connectivity. It uses its Wi-Fi capability to connect code running on the card to web or app-based user interfaces using the company’s Imp cloud servers.

To promote speedy uptake of the platform Intel have announced their intention to run a competition for Edison-based applications. First place will scoop $500,000 from a total booty of $1.3 million. Intel will begin shipping the Edison in the summer of 2014.